Rhinegold: New partnership for RPO and Google Arts & Culture. “The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) and Google Arts & Culture have launched a new project to bring some of the orchestra’s content online. Visitors to the Google Arts & Culture website will be able to explore the RPO and its music through exclusive interviews, features and performance highlights.”

State Archives of North Carolina: Rare Irving Berlin WWII Play Photographs Online. “The State Archives of North Carolina’s Military Collection is excited to announce the availability online of 416 original photographs documenting the international tour of American songwriter Irving Berlin’s traveling U.S. Army play This Is The Army was performed from October 1943 through October 1945 during World War II.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Mashable: Zooming out on Google Maps no longer shows a flat map. “Take a look at a map today, and you might think North America is larger than Africa or Greenland is larger than Mexico and China. But that’s not true in the slightest. The issue derives from trying to represent a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface. Luckily for everyone, Google is solving this problem with the latest update to Google Maps.”

TechCrunch: Facebook Dating will be a feature, not an app; here’s a peek . “Facebook Dating doesn’t plan to launch a standalone dating app, which should temper expectations about how deeply it’s diving into Tinder and Match Group’s territory. The feature will be based inside Facebook’s main app, alongside its many other utilities buried beyond the home screen. It’s not ready for the public yet, but company employees are now internally testing it — though they’re warned that it’s not for dating their co-workers.”

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Land: 3 free tools to comprehensively test page speed . “Having a fast site is important, since faster sites are rewarded with improved search engine optimization (SEO) and the ability to drive more visits and conversions. More people visiting your site can lead to more sales, signups or traffic in general. That’s a true win-win. Of course, where there’s a positive, there is always a negative. The flip side to fast sites is slow sites, and slow sites tend to suffer from lack of sales, sign-ups and traffic in general. That is definitely not a win-win. Once you get above 3 seconds, many visitors leave before the page loads, many more will bounce, and your conversion rate will plummet. Not good.”

MakeUseOf: 5 Chrome Extensions to Improve Facebook in Every Way . “Ah, Facebook. It drains productivity, infringes upon privacy, and even makes us sad. But we can’t live without it, can we? You can’t escape Facebook, so let’s try and make things better at least. This article focuses only on the desktop Facebook experience when used with Google Chrome. But remember, you can use Chrome extensions in Opera and other Chromium-based browsers, as well as in Firefox.” Interesting choices.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Poynter: Snopes is feuding with one of the internet’s most notorious hoaxers. “t looks like a Snopes fact check. It reads like a Snopes fact check. And on first glance, it looks like one of the outlandish fake news stories that ends up getting debunked. But the article — titled ‘FACT-CHECK: Did Kim Jong Un Really Invite Donald Trump To His Birthday party?’ — isn’t from Snopes at all. It’s satire. And it’s just one example of the ongoing feud between the fact-checking project and one of the internet’s most notorious hoaxers.”

New York Times: How Fake Influence Campaigns on Facebook Lured Real People. “In late June, after word emerged that the white supremacists who organized last year’s deadly ‘Unite the Right’ march in Charlottesville, Va., had applied to hold an anniversary rally this month in Washington, a local political activist, Brendan Orsinger, saw that a Facebook event page had been created for a counterprotest. He recognized it as trouble. Little did he know just how much.”

Radioworld: Alt Station Experiments With VR. “Due to space limitations, only 70 people are allowed into 91.9 WFPK(FM)’s ‘Live Lunch’ music concerts. The events are broadcast live on the Louisville, Ky., independent alternative station every Friday at noon. Until now, the only way to enjoy these concerts was to be one of the lucky 70 attendees or to listen via WFPK’s FM broadcast or web streaming. But things changed the first day of June. When the band Awolnation took to the stage at the downtown Louisville Public Media performance studio that noon hour, a new audience got to see the concert in virtual reality.”

BBC: Facebook rejects Montreal museum’s ad over Picasso nude. “The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts online ad for its big summer exhibit was blocked because it showed abstract breasts painted by the modern master. The museum eventually had to reach out directly to Facebook in order to get the posts authorised.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

b2o: Michelle Moravec — The Endless Night of Wikipedia’s Notable Woman Problem. “The challenge, if we wish to write women back into history via Wikipedia, is to figure out how to shift the frame of reference so that our stars can shine, since the problem of who precisely is ‘worthy of commemoration’ so often seems to exclude women. This essay takes on one of the ‘tests’ used to determine whether content is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia, notability, to explore how the purportedly neutral concept works against efforts to create entries about female historical figures.”

Arizona State University: Crowdfunding success relies on friendly networks, ASU research finds. “Four years ago this summer, a phenomenon hit social media when millions of people participated in the “ALS Ice Bucket Challenge,” raising more than $115 million for charity. An Arizona State University professor has published a research paper looking at these kinds of social-media crowdsourcing phenomena and why they’re so successful.” Good morning, Internet…

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